Blurb:The genius and the sunshine girl. As children, we fought bitterly and often, bickering every chance we got.

But then we grew up. Then we came back.

Delphine Dansey carries her heart on the outside of her body; she’s looking for love and chasing dreams. She’s spoiled and selfish, the kind of beautiful that’s made for money and fame. But somehow she’s ended up in my keeping: a pretty submissive I can’t seem to resist, a lover who obsesses and tempts me.

I thought I’d locked my heart away a long time ago, along with all my other weaknesses. But some doors won’t stay closed, no matter how hard I fight to keep them shut. She unravels me, just like our friends are unraveling, just like Thornchapel itself is unraveling.

All year long, we’ve been sowing lust and jealousy and pain, heedless of the consequences. But a harvest is inevitable, and so now we must reap our sorrows.

And our sighs.

*Harvest of Sighs is Book Three in the Thornchapel series.*

Excerpt: “Dammit, Auden, let me the fuck go.”

“Use your safeword, and I will.”

I open my mouth.

I can’t make the words come out.

May I, I think. May I, May I, May I. But still my tongue won’t move; the sounds won’t push past my lips.

Auden’s mouth curls up at the corner. “That’s what I thought.”

“Fuck you,” I retort.

“No,” Auden says heatedly, his hands tightening on my wrists, “fuck you. Just yesterday you promised—you promised me that you were mine, you promised me forever together. You swore. And now you’re running away again? You couldn’t even keep your promise for twenty-four hours?”

I sputter, tripping over the words as they tumble out of my mouth. “There is no promise, Auden! Things have fucking changed! And you lied about it! Jesus fucking Christ, Auden, you lied about it.”

“I didn’t lie.”

“You didn’t tell me.”

He sniffs. “That’s not lying.”

I glare at him. He glares right back at me. “That’s a juvenile justification and you know it,” I say.

“I was going to tell you.”

“When? After you’d fucked me again? Or after Lammas? Or maybe ten years from now when I finally worked up the courage to ask you to marry me?”

“Oh my God, Auden, that’s not the point,” I groan. “The point is we can never get married, and we can’t be together, and we can never be together again, and you knew and you didn’t tell me. You let me—you let us—yesterday, we—”

I can barely get the words out. He and I have done something unthinkably bad, something so wrong that even the word wrong isn’t heavy enough. We were more wrong than wrong—we were corrupt and unholy. Immoral and depraved.

“I know what we did yesterday,” Auden says, his voice as gentle as the grip on my wrists is firm. “I don’t see the problem, and I don’t see why you can’t keep your promise to me.”

I stare at him a moment, totally confounded. “Auden…am I talking at thin air right now? Am I not making sense? Is it my accent? Should I switch to yours?” I say the last part in my best I wear a regatta blazer to actual regattas voice, and he makes a face.

“Don’t do that, you’re terrible at it,” he says. “Listen, it’s not like—this isn’t like you’re thinking. I didn’t wait to tell you because I was trying to trick you, I waited because I wanted to find the right way to explain it all. Say it the right way so that you wouldn’t run away from me when I told you, so that you wouldn’t sever your heart from mine. I didn’t want this to be the end of us. And why should it be? Why shouldn’t you belong to me?” he finishes with a wild urgency.

I search his face. His stupid, handsome face, where even now I see glimmers of yesterday’s revels. A small bruise in the shape of Rebecca’s bite on his jaw, visible even under the shadow of his day-old beard, a small scratch disappearing into his cinnamon-colored hair from his run through the trees. The vibrant flicker of those hazel eyes—the eyes of the forest.

Never in a thousand years did I think God would be this sadistic or this pitiless, to put me in a position where I have to refuse this man.

“But I want it,” he says, and with his eyes like that and his voice so low, there’s no mistaking what it is.

“You can’t want it,” I whisper, and his grip tightens on my wrists as he pushes them out to the sides until my arms are spread on either side of me and my wrists are pinned to the wall. It’s like I’m about to be crucified, like I’m already on the cross, but without the nails and the thorns, because Auden himself is all the nails and thorns I’ll ever need.

“Oh, can’t I?” he says. “Because I do, St. Sebastian, I do want it. I need it. I don’t care what that makes me, I don’t care what that means for my immortal soul. I’ve known you were mine since I kissed you in the thorn chapel, and I’ve known that you wanted to be mine since you let me bite your lip until it bled.” His eyes drop to my lip piercing now, and I can feel how much he wants to pull on it and kiss it. I can feel how much he wants that labret running along his shaft, how much he’d love to see it gleaming in the dark while he fucks me. “You can run away all you want, but it’s too late. You already swore to me. I’ve already known what it was like to have your heart in my hands, and it’s simply too late.”

He ducks his head enough to move his lips over mine—something both more and less than a kiss—something like a promise made with touch instead of words.

And fuck me if I don’t want to promise something right back.

“It can’t be too late,” I whisper. “Even if you did wait to tell me until you got what you wanted.”

Auden doesn’t lift his mouth from mine, and I feel his words as much as I hear them.

“And what did I get, my little martyr? What do you think I wanted?”

I wish so much I weren’t still hard as I answer him. “You wanted to fuck me.”

“No,” he says, tugging on my lip piercing with his teeth. “I wanted what I still want.” He kisses me again. “I want forever, stubborn boy. Only that.”

About the Author: Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.

Blurb:I’m an outcast and a loner, named for death itself. Fate wasn’t supposed to have plans for me.

But then she came back—the girl I once kissed in a thorn-covered chapel in the woods. She came back, and I could no more resist her than I could pry out my own heart. And by some trick of fate, she wants me as much as I want her. The only problem? She also wants the man who owns Thornchapel, Auden Guest.

And so do I.

Eight years ago, I did something to Auden, something terrible. He hurt me back the only way he knew how, and so here we are: our hatred seasoned with pain and my loneliness seasoned with longing. The only thing we can agree on is Proserpina Markham, and she wants us to find a way to be together—all three of us.

If Auden wants to earn her as his submissive, then he has to earn me as well.

But with the discovery of bones behind the altar and the carnal revel of Beltane fast approaching, it’s becoming clear that Thornchapel’s secrets are much deeper and older than any of us could have ever guessed. And no matter how bright and merry a feast of sparks may be, it’s always followed by ashes.

And darkness.

Excerpt:
Shame, hot and prickling, needles everywhere at my face and chest and belly as I begin to bend down to the floor. The cool air that caresses my pussy is now everywhere as the position begins to expose my most secret flesh, and there’s no pretending away the reality of what I’m doing. I’m doing something I’ve never done before, I’m offering up the filthiest part of me for inspection, and despite everything the three of us have shared in the past twenty-four hours, I’m flooded with shame. It’s real shame now, not play-shame, and my safe word floats to the top of my mind, a buoy in the clear waters.

Convivificat.

I don’t want to safe out right now, I’m nowhere near the edge, but it’s nice to have it there all the same. Reassuring. There’s nothing they can do that I can’t stop.

And anyway, this is who I am—who I’ve been growing into ever since I found the words to define it.

About the Author: Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.

Blurb:I’m an outcast and a loner, named for death itself. Fate wasn’t supposed to have plans for me.

But then she came back—the girl I once kissed in a thorn-covered chapel in the woods. She came back, and I could no more resist her than I could pry out my own heart. And by some trick of fate, she wants me as much as I want her. The only problem? She also wants the man who owns Thornchapel, Auden Guest.

And so do I.

Eight years ago, I did something to Auden, something terrible. He hurt me back the only way he knew how, and so here we are: our hatred seasoned with pain and my loneliness seasoned with longing. The only thing we can agree on is Proserpina Markham, and she wants us to find a way to be together—all three of us.

If Auden wants to earn her as his submissive, then he has to earn me as well.

But with the discovery of bones behind the altar and the carnal revel of Beltane fast approaching, it’s becoming clear that Thornchapel’s secrets are much deeper and older than any of us could have ever guessed. And no matter how bright and merry a feast of sparks may be, it’s always followed by ashes.

And darkness.

Excerpt: I can feel that beat, that pulsing, between the three of us so strongly right now, and I know Auden and Poe can too. I know they can feel that what we have together is more than biology, more than our odd little religion, more than years of knowing each other.

Those things we have with the other three in our group.

But this? This holy, ravening, primal, and marrow-deep need for each other? This is something unique to the three of us, and there’s no denying it, no arguing with it.

Fighting it is as pointless as screaming up at a storm on the heath.

Auden reaches down with his other hand; I hear the tear of fabric. The muscles in his arm contract and flex as he works her underneath her skirt. “So wet, little bride,” he purrs. “So ready to be fucked in this little hole.”

He grabs my hand and pulls me forward before I can react, and he guides me to her. Past the tear in her cute librarian tights to the place where she’s wet enough that a man could shove in with a single stroke. My shaft—huge and latex-shiny in the dark—pulses as Auden presses my fingers into her with his own until two of my fingers are curling up inside her and both our hands are wet.

Poe rocks against us both, her hands scrabbling for any kind of purchase until she manages to brace one on the bookshelf behind her and the other on Auden’s shoulder.

“Please, please fuck me,” she begs, and I know at this point she doesn’t care who she’s talking to. Auden or me—or hell, maybe Rebecca or Delphine or Becket.

“Oh, we’re going to,” Auden growls, and I like that we, I like it so much that I couldn’t deny Poe is right about fixing whatever is between the three of us even if I wanted to.

Could I have ever been content without knowing this? Knowing the feel of Auden’s hands on my hips as they are now, guiding me between Proserpina’s waiting thighs as she wraps her arms around my neck? Knowing once again the feel of being between them, as I was that night, of Auden reaching around me and gripping my cock with a casual arrogance that has me shuddering?

He notches my tip against her, his hand moving past me to grip her arse under her skirt, and then he brings us together, like we’re his to join. His pets to breed, his concubines to amuse him. It’s this I’m thinking of as I sink deep into Poe, letting out a long breath as her sweetness grips me, squeezes me.

“How does she feel?” Auden asks in my ear. He sounds bored, but I know that trick for what it is; I know that when his blood gets hot, his voice gets cold. And maybe it’s the thrills dancing up my body from the head of my cock to the soles of my feet, maybe it’s Poe biting her lower lip like she wishes it were my mouth she was nibbling—or maybe it’s the sheer fucking filth of this moment, Auden and me wedging her against the bookshelves in the dark while the others continue to laugh and drink only a stone’s throw away—

Whatever it is, I want to test Auden’s coolness, I want to make him feel for me just a little bit of what I feel for him always—desperate, clawing ache. A pining so animalistic and rough it shames me.

I want him to shame me.

And maybe it’s that last impulse more than anything that makes me do it. I turn my head to his—he’s so close that I can feel his breath on my cheek, so warm in the cool air of the library—and I kiss his throat. Right next to his Adam’s apple, right in the little hollow there. I kiss him and then I part my lips just enough to taste him with a small dart of my tongue. He tastes like clean skin with just the barest hint of sweat, like a man just beginning to get worked up. And he smells—God, he smells how he always smells.

Like this wonderful, terrible place tucked into the wild, wind-whipped moors. Like Thornchapel.

He stills at the touch of my lips, as if he can’t bear to breathe, and then at the flicker of my tongue, he lets out a low sound of fury. For a minute I wonder if he’ll hit me again, and I don’t care how wrong it is, how against the rules of kink, I want to eat up all his passion, all of his energy, I want him to be lost like me and I want to see it and feel it and take it into my body to remember as long as I live.

He doesn’t hit me.

He bites me.

About the Author: Sierra Simone is a USA Today Bestselling former librarian (who spent too much time reading romance novels at the information desk.) She lives with her husband and family in Kansas City.

From New York Times bestselling author Katy
Regnery comes a dark and twisted retelling of the beloved fairytale,
Cinderella!

My name
is Ashley Ellis…

I was
thirteen years old when my mother – retired supermodel, Tig – married Mosier
Răumann, who was twice her age and the head of the Răumann crime family.

When I
turned eighteen, my mother mysteriously died. Only then did I discover the dark
plans my stepfather had in store for me all along; the debauched “work” he
expected me to do.

With the
help of my godfather, Gus, I have escaped from Mosier’s clutches, but his twin
sons and henchmen have been tasked with hunting me down. And they will stop at
nothing to return my virgin body to their father

…dead or
alive.

**
Contemporary Romance. Due to profanity and very strong sexual content, this
book is not intended for readers under the age of 18.**

♥♥♥♥♥

Fragments of Ash is part of the ~a modern fairytale~ collection:
contemporary, standalone romances inspired by beloved fairy tales.

Instead of going inside, I walk around the house, to the backyard, to see if I can help bring in any dirty dishes, but the picnic table is empty. All traces of our dinner party have already been cleaned up by the Ducharmes siblings.

I look up at the midnight sky, at the dozens and dozens of stars, and I wonder if Gus is right. What he says feels right, but I feel very young and very small as I stare up at the universe. It’s not wrong to give yourself over to loving if the chance arises.

“Yes, you do,” I answer, giving him a shy and tentative smile before I turn my attention back upward.

My skin prickles with awareness. My lips tingle, remembering the insistent pressure of his. And elsewhere in my body, I clench hard, willing those deep-set tremors not to start up again right now. I want to believe what Gus has told me—that liking and wanting a man isn’t wrong—but it’s new to me, and I need a little time to reconcile my desire and conscience together.

“When I lived in DC, it was what I missed the most, besides Noelle. More than the cheese. More than the beer. More than the skiing.” He stops, standing beside me, staring up at the firmament. “I missed Vermont’s night skies. And the millions of stars.”

“I can see why,” I say. “When I lived in LA, I never saw stars.” I giggle. “I mean, I saw the people kind, but not the sky kind.”

“Wait a second! Gisele? Did you ever meet Tom Brady?” he asks, his voice eager.

“Let me guess.” I glance at his face. “Patriots fan?”

“The biggest.”

“Tig went to their wedding, but I never met him. Sorry,” I say, giggling as he lays a hand over his heart and pretends to cry. “Speaking of the rich and famous, Noelle tells me you met the vice president while you worked in Washington.”

“She did?” His teasing expression disappears quickly as he straightens, dropping his hand. “Uh, yeah. Long time ago.”

“Not so long,” I say.

“Yeah, well . . . I guess it just feels like a while ago.” I wait for him to say more, hoping to learn why he left Washington so abruptly, but he stretches his arms over his head and yawns. “I’m tired. You must be exhausted.”

“At school I was on the dining hall rotation, which meant cooking for one hundred souls regularly. Tonight was a breeze.”

“Your soup was amazing.”“Thank you.”“The steak too.”“Thank you again.”“And the tart.”“That was your sister. Let her know you thought so.”“And the kiss.”

“Thank—” I’m grinning at him, but my eyes widen at his unexpected compliment, and I immediately look back up at the sky. It’s dark out so he can’t see my blush.

His chuckle is soft and low beside me, and maybe I’m wicked for not feeling more guilty, but I feel my smile grow as I trace Orion’s belt. I don’t dare look at him, but I feel him step closer to me, the warmth of his chest radiating against my back. If I moved slightly, one step even, his body would be flush against mine, and the shiver down my arms has nothing to do with the night chill. I want him to touch me, but I know he won’t.

As though he can read my mind, he whispers, close to my ear, “Not unless you ask.”

I close my eyes and say a prayer for strength and virtue, which, sadly, works, because the next thing I hear is his footsteps receding.

New
York Times and USA Today bestselling author Katy
Regnery started her writing career by enrolling in a
short story class in January 2012. One year later, she signed her first
contract, and Katy’s first novel was published in September 2013.

Katy’s first modern fairytale romance, The
Vixen and the Vet, was nominated for a RITA® in 2015 and won the 2015
Kindle Book Award for romance. Katy’s boxed set, The English Brothers Boxed
Set, Books #1–4, hit the USA Today bestseller list in 2015, and her
Christmas story, Marrying Mr. English, appeared on the list a week
later. In May 2016, Katy’s Blueberry Lane collection, The Winslow Brothers
Boxed Set, Books #1–4, became a New York Times e-book bestseller.

Katy’s books are available in English, French,
German, Italian, Portuguese and Turkish.

Katy lives in the relative wilds of northern
Fairfield County, Connecticut, where her writing room looks out at the woods,
and her husband, two young children, two dogs, and one Blue Tonkinese kitten
create just enough cheerful chaos to remind her that the very best love stories
begin at home.

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